Note: All references to the user guide in this post refer to the public user guide available on the Magento wiki, as opposed to the user guide book for the Enterprise Edition of Magento.

This post is the thirteenth part of a series covering the feature set of the Magento PHP-based e-commerce package. In particular, it reviews the marketing promotions and tools features. The majority of the features listed in this area have already been covered in this series. As such, sections for those features in this post are simply linked to other posts where appropriate.

Private Sales

See the Catalog Browsing post.

Coupons

Coupons are implemented as part of the shopping cart price rule system, which is discussed in the user guide. These price rules allow for things like fixed or percentage-based discounts as well as free shipping and can be restricted to specific stores, products, product categories, ranges of product quantities in the order, customer group, coupon code, or any combination of the above. To manage them, go to Promotions - Shopping Cart Price Rules in the admin area.

Another area of the user guide describes the section of the storefront interface used for entering a coupon code. When using the default theme, go to the shopping cart page and look in the page's center immediately below the shopping cart listing. A block labeled DISCOUNT CODES allows for the entry of coupon codes to apply to the other.

Catalog Promotional Pricing

This refers to catalog pricing rules, which are covered in the user guide as well as a webcast. They're similar to shopping cart price rules but apply to individual products instead of entire cart contents. Unlike shopping cart price rules, catalog pricing rules do not use coupon codes and cannot be published to an RSS feed. They can be managed from Promotions - Catalog Price Rules in the admin area.

Free Shipping Option

See the Shipping post.

Multi-Tier Pricing

See the Product Browsing post.

Bundled Products

See the Catalog Management post.

Customer Group-specific Pricing and Group-specific Tier Pricing

The user guide and a screencast cover tier pricing, which is basically a fancy expression for discounts given when items are purchased within specific quantity ranges (generally what would be considered "in bulk"). Tier pricing is managed by going to Catalog - Manage Products in the admin area, creating or editing a product, and going to the Tier Price section within the Prices tab. Prices can be applied to all or select customer groups.

Landing Page Tool for Campaigns

This feature allows for the creation of custom landing pages that can pull in Magento blocks. It's detailed in both the user guide and a screencast. As of this writing, the user guide includes mention of a Store View field that no longer exists in Magento 1.3.2.3. This presumably implies that CMS pages could at one point be restricted in scope to particular websites or stores, but that capability is no longer available.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

See the Search Engine Optimization post.

URL Rewrites

See the Search Engine Optimization post.

Recently Viewed Products

See the Catalog Management post.

Recently Compared Items

See the Catalog Management post.

New Items Promotional Tool

This feature isn't covered anywhere in the user guide. This forum post implies that it did exist at some point in the 1.2 branch, but none of the referenced files exist in Magento 1.3.2.3. Another forum post suggests that the feature didn't exist in mid-2008, between the 1.0 and 1.1 releases. There's at least one community module available on Magento Connect to fulfill this need. It's odd that the feature list would include something developed well after initial releases but already removed from the application.

Up-sells in Shopping Cart

See the Catalog Browsing post.

Cross-sells on Product Pages

See the Catalog Browsing post.

Send to a Friend

See the Product Browsing post.

Send Wishlist to a Friend

See the Customer Accounts post.

RSS Feeds for New Products, New Specials and New Tags

The New Tags feed is mentioned in the Analytics and Reporting post. A section of the user guide covers the New Products and New Specials feeds. New Products is controlled by the Set Product as New from/to Date fields in the General tab when editing a product from Catalog - Manage Products in the admin area. New Specials is also controlled by editing a product, except that the Special Price and Special Price From/To Date fields in the Prices tab are used.

In order for RSS feeds to be available (via an RSS icon in the site footer when the default theme is used — a rather out-of-the-way place to put it), you must go to System - Configuration - Catalog - RSS Feeds and change default configuration settings. Set Enable RSS to Enable in the Rss Config section and the setting for the appropriate feed to Enable in the Catalog section.

Auto-generated Site Map

See the Search Engine Optimization post.

Google Sitemap

See the Search Engine Optimization post.

Polls

The user guide and a screencast cover this feature. To manage polls, go to CMS - Poll Manager. Polls can be opened or closed by changing the value of their Status field. Each contains a single question and a variable number of answers, each of which has an associated vote count that can also be changed from this area. The dates of polls being opened and closed are recorded for reference purposes.

Potential additional features include automated opening or closing of polls on specified dates or allowing customers to select multiple answers. It appears that this feature was intentionally kept simple to meet the needs of the lowest common denominator in terms of the features it offers.

Newsletter Management

See the Customer Accounts post.

Wrap Up

In terms of this list of features as a section, it seems like it was stuffed with any feature that could remotely be related to marketing or promotion. That aside, pricing rules and tier pricing are well done and come out as the saving grace of this section. RSS feeds are nice, though they could be placed a bit more prominently (and perhaps with a bit more redundancy) in the default theme. Landing pages really only provide routing configuration for custom pages. Polls are a nice feature, but the implementation is very simplistic and the feature itself seems like a better candidate for a community module than a core one. Overall, this feature section seems quizzically defined insofar as the mixture of features seem to imply a lack of certainy about what its contents should be.